“You should think about what your friend Ricky Jones is doing… plumbing. It’s a good trade… you’ll always find work, wherever you go.”
“Plumbing… you’ve got to be kidding. The hell I’ll walk around in dirty clothes, swinging a monkey-wrench and fixing fucking pipes,” I thought to myself.
“Yeah, I’ll think about it,” I said to my father.
OPERATION DAISY
October/November 1981
We were back up in the operational area on our third and final bush trip. Nothing had changed much at Ondangwa in our short absence. We sat packed and sweating in the hot, tin-roofed canteen next to the small pool and had a welcome-back briefing on what was happening in the area.
Over 2,000 insurgents had been killed since the beginning of the year, with 1,295 being confirmed. This was not including the external operations, where they claimed 300 had been killed by bombings alone and 1,000 in Operation Protea. The SADF had lost 49 troops which they claimed was less than the previous year. The local black population had suffered heavily, with 91 civilians murdered by the insurgents and another 62 who had died in landmine explosions. A further 103 had been abducted into Angola to forcibly join SWAPO. We were told that Operation Protea had dealt a devastating and humiliating blow to FAPLA and that cross-border insurgent raids into South West Africa were down in the last month, as SWAPO and FAPLA were still reeling from the enormous loss of men and equipment. We had shown FAPLA it was not wise to interfere with us while we were dealing with SWAPO. The good news of the briefing was that D Company was going to be on Fireforce again, which meant at least one platoon at a time would be on reaction force, lounging around the pool waiting for the siren to wail.
With no immediate action planned for us I started working out in the little gym and going on runs. I set up a punch-bag filled with towels and sand next to the laundry room and started to work the bag.
“I think I’m going to box when I get back to Civvy Street. Turn pro and get a title.”
Stan laughed. “Turn pro and get fucked up is what you mean! You can’t just decide to turn pro, china. You’ve got to come up through the ranks from a kid—fight your way up, get provincial colours, national colours. Its takes a mindset like one of these idiots—like that Ackerman. He’s been boxing since he was five years old. He’s like a machine.”
“Bullshit. I’ll take Ackerman out. He’s no machine. I’ll whip that boy before he can say ‘Stand in the door’.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Hell, yeah!”
I held Stan’s sneer.
Stan still had a thing about Ackerman, whose brief reign of power had fizzled over the last months of combat, of which he had missed a lot. Yet he still waddled around the company like a short, squat tank with eyes like a snake and a fist always ready to knock someone out. Just a few weeks ago in a disco in Bloemfontein we heard that he had knocked a civvy cold with one sucker-punch in the middle of the dance floor. Ackerman had always been wary of me because he couldn’t figure me out. I was not a loudmouth and didn’t swagger my stuff, like a good macho Afrikaner boy would. He and I had sparred with each other on PT course where I had caught him with a few educated punches. The incident of beating the acting company sergeant-major shitless at Ombalantu had caught even his reptilian attention. (He had not been around at the time it happened and had missed all the operations because he had been called back to South Africa to box for 1 Parachute Battalion in inter-unit tournaments but he had heard about it—as had almost every troop in the battalion.) He had always had a dislike for Stan, eyeing him coldly, waiting for an opportunity to arise. Stan knew it too and I think he had bad dreams about bumping into Ackerman late one night when no one was around.
I slammed the bag with a left-right-left hook combination, then sat down panting. “I think I can do it. I think I can be South African champ. Just got to get back into shape.”
Stan laughed.
After a few weeks doing short patrols and happily hanging around the pool on Fireforce, there came word of a night operation on a SWAPO base in Angola. It was apparently going to be the first night attack that South Africa had ever done in the Angolan conflict. It was to be a combined operation with 44 Brigade, which was disbanded a year or so later to be built into a para unit. At that time it was the small but notorious unit with all the crazy ex-Vietnam Yanks with parachute tattoos on their arms and ex-Rhodesians who had joined the SADF.
We drove out in trucks to meet them at a secluded spot to practise for the op. It was 100 or so kilometres back into the Etosha National Park, close to where we had trained for Operation Protea.
44 Brigade had three or four Q-Kars with them—army Jeeps with twin MAGs mounted on them. We spent cold and miserable nights doing fire and movement with live ammunition, once again going through the motions of clearing out trenches and bunkers with RPGs and grenades. The night lit up with red tracers bouncing off the ground as we dived into the dirt and opened fire.
“Bunker at 2 o’clock… RPG take it out! Forward! Keep the line straight… don’t bunch up!”
For three nights we practised till well after midnight. Then we would try fix a hot meal in the dark and catch some sleep, still full of sand from diving into the dirt. To help matters a bitter cold and windy spell had sprung up since our return to the border.
The target base was manned by 300 SWAPO terrs, very deep in Angola. Once again the leaders had in their wisdom decided to send just over 100 of us to do the job. Everyone seemed relieved when the day before we were supposed to go in, a cold windy morning, we were brought together and told that the president himself had called off the operation the night before, deeming it too dangerous. (I found out later that apparently every cross-border operation had to be approved by then President P. W. Botha.)
We returned to Ondangwa happy to resume Fireforce and our suntanning duty, but after a week of chilling out, a jubilant and smiling Commandant Lindsay hurriedly called us together next to the pool and announced that another very big operation was in the offing. The man loved war with a passion. He once again paced with enthusiasm in front of the company in his short pants, flashing his teeth. He told us that this was going to be as big as Operation Protea, but that this time we would be going even deeper into Angola to look for Boy who had retreated from the bases close to our border, but was still running the training camps hundreds of kilometres inside Angola— business as usual. Lindsay told us that all this new information had come to light from the enormous quantity of maps and intelligence we had gathered in Operation Protea. (I realized later that all this new info, without a doubt, had come from the mountain of maps and documents that Valk 4 had discovered in the FAPLA ops room at Ongiva, where we had found Kruger’s bush hat in the desk drawer.)
It was going to be a full mechanized fighting group, just like Operation Protea, where the convoys of each group were perhaps eight or ten clicks long. The target was a cluster of SWAPO training bases hundreds of kilometres into Angola. This was going to be the deepest operation into Angola since Savannah in 1975. This time our sister H Company, with infantry, who were already in training at Etosha, was going to spearhead the attack on the bases at Bambi and Cheraquera farther north, while we would be on standby as reaction force at a FAPLA airstrip called Ionde, 120 kilometres into Angola. Ionde was still to be captured. Three C-130s would be dropping a few companies of paratrooper ‘campers’ (paratroopers who had completed their national service but who were doing their compulsory annual three-week to three-month camp that was required of every army-going South African for 15 years after their initial spell of national service) who would be stopper groups waiting behind the target areas.